Baron James Ashanti accomplishes a remarkable success in presenting multifaceted aspects of Indian culture. Ashanti touches its intimate radiance by writing about women in diff erent times and spaces. Th e character of Indian women has been domineering, accommodating and suppressible as well, in diff erent circumstances. Th e poor women have suff ered male domination in some tribes, families and sub-cultures. Th is has been ably highlighted. Baron James Ashanti’s narrative poetry incorporates in this volume the images like jewels imbedded inside an oriental monument that refl ect the shades of the times as light falls on them. Dr. H. K. Kaul President Th e Poetry Society (India) An esoteric drift in the beginning ‘from another time I come to redeem’ along with authoritative repetitions imparts a bardic quality in the opening poems but we are soon to enter the 21st century India and confront a determinate modern tone of a powerful poet ruthlessly vocal about the evils of society still persisting in many parts and within many cultural groups of India. As we visit Irom Sharmila Chanu or Manorama, look at Delhi and Udaipur through the sensitive eyes , revisit personalities like Gandhi and Tagore in the ‘garden’ of the poet’s mind or trace the course of Maa Ganga pausing briefl y at Varanasi where the rapture of the devotees might seem “organized chaos” to the unaccustomed eye, we are to realize that we have only been following the trail of conscience as the poet disquietens our inner stirrings and looks around at the scenes of human suff ering. Th e perspective of time sharply locates the poems in Indian present or Indian past, with an unfl inching insistence less concerned with the aesthetics of philosophical realm, asserting the content as the prime matter of the poems, yet achieving a graceful sense of motion taking the readers along in the Behta Bayda /Floating Raft towards scruples where ancient Indian gongs resonate. Dr. Zinia Mitra English Department Chair Nakshalbari College Behta Bayda Baron James Ashanti written by Baron James Ashanti f l o a t i n g r a f t Behta Bayda Th e poems in this volume would affi rm that Baron James know his India is in love with her! Dr. Jagannath Prasad Das